


The Buckwheat Flower

by foxxing



Category: GOT7
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Historical, Implied Death, M/M, Oneshot, it is sad, some historical accuracy, some historical inaccuracy, to 1950s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 16:30:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11672871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxxing/pseuds/foxxing
Summary: God is cruel. The first time he ever heard this he was five years old.A 1950's AU where Jaebum goes to war and doesn't come home, and Jinyoung learns the strength in tiny miracles.





	1. i

**Author's Note:**

> somewhere, unforgiven  
> i will wait for you.  
> 
> 
>   
>   
> 

_ God is cruel.  _ The first time he ever heard this he was five years old. 

It meant nothing to him then. God was a concept beyond his reach much as cruelty would be for years to come. Park Jinyoung had sat on the hand woven rug in their living room moving a wooden train back and forth on the carpet in an arbitrary arc while his father sagged on the couch, his mother looking on. 

_ God is so cruel,  _ his father wept, bent at the waist. His mother patted his father’s head and her eyes, too, were wet with incomprehensible tears. His sisters, older than himself by three and five years, hid in their bedrooms and cried into their arms. He felt no sadness, only confusion. Head tilted like the puppy he so closely resembled he lay down his train and felt compelled to ask. 

Jinyoung knew, though. His grandfather, his father’s father, had died that day. Death too was a concept that was as foreign to him as the tongues of those strange men he sometimes saw on the streets before hiding behind his mother’s skirt. But his memories of  _ halabeoji  _ were vague. Distant. His grandfather was old, a relic from an era long forgotten and crushed to dust under the boot heels of time and conquest. They had lived well, grasping onto the remains of what it meant to be a  _ yangban  _ family, and thus he could not quite understand how it felt for his father to feel alone in the room crowded by his wife and son. 

He had looked up. “Appa, why are you crying?” 

“Because I am sad.” 

“Why are you sad?”

“Because your grandfather died.  _ My _ appa.”

Jinyoung looked down. He was confused by death. The finality of it was just a fairytale.

And yet he felt the tugging in his chest of tears much the way he did when he was tired or in trouble. “Maybe he's just lost in the buckwheat fields,” Jinyoung had said with a child’s hopeful honesty.

His father looked up. He was unrecognizable with grief but it was a face that would linger forever. Sniffling, he tried to smile a father’s smile. 

“Will you go look for him for me, Jinyoung-ah?” 

“Yes, appa,” he had said, and ran from the house. 

The buckwheat fields in which his father implored him to search for his grandfather were beautiful. They spread for miles over uninterrupted countryside save for the split of the dirt road leading from town and into the city. Oceans of soft green peppered with the white buds of tiny flowers that sometimes refused to bloom. The sky that day was bluer than he'd ever seen it; he waded into the buckwheat that brushed to and fro across the exposed skin of his shins where it was unkempt before harvest. Jinyoung first looked up at the sky, then to the wheat which spread before him like the vastness of heaven itself, then back to the sky and felt a dizziness as space pulled him in two directions. Wind that whispered things to him and traced patterns on his skin blew his black hair in front of his eyes as he walked and called out to someone who would never hear him.

_ “Halabeoji!”  _ he called, tiny voice snatched by the air and carried away from him.  _ “Halabeoji!  _ Where are you? Appa is looking for you!  _ Halabeoji!”  _

It was strange to him that a man as tall and thin as his grandfather could get lost here in the field when Jinyoung had no problem finding his way. Jinyoung scrunched up his nose, taking a deep breath to call out once more. Futility, like the others, would remain a stranger to him. 

_ “Halabeoji!  _ Where—” 

The buckwheat was not tall this time of year. It barely reached his knees, obscuring very little, but nonetheless he was startled into releasing a little boy’s shrill scream when a dark head popped up from the depths of the grass only yards away. He felt that same familiar pull of tears in his chest and tried to swallow them back when a face not unlike his own peered at him with slanted eyes from beneath a black curtain of hair. 

“Yah,” the other boy said, and his voice was like the sticky candy that Jinyoung craved so much when his father went into town. “Why are you yelling?”

Jinyoung sniffled and pouted childishly. “I'm looking for my grandpa. Have you seen him?” 

The boy stood. He was taller than himself and dressed like Jinyoung in a navy school boy’s uniform that ended right above knees purpled and scraped. Eyes that reminded him of the cat that hissed at him from beneath his sister’s bed blinked owlishly at him underneath his hair. The fabric of his clothes were dusted from pollen and soil as though he'd been rolling around beneath the buckwheat grass. He was a strange boy.  _ Other.  _ Jinyoung felt different in his presence. 

“Why would your grandpa be out here?”

The sound of the other boy’s heavy Korean made him happy. He had become weary of listening to the thick molasses sound of unfamiliar Japanese in the mouths of his teacher and classmates. 

“I don't know. My appa said he might be lost out here and that I should look.”

“Your appa told you that?” 

Jinyoung nodded. He strangely felt so compelled to tell this boy the truth. 

“Your grandfather is dead,” the boy said casually.  Yet hearing it from someone else didn't make it any more true. 

“What does that mean?” He asked, and the wind passed between their bodies, brushing stalks of white flowers against the tan of their skinny legs. His hair and the other boy’s hair blew and tangled at their foreheads in a mirror. Here, in the fields and drawn in by the silence, trapped between worlds, he entertained the idea that maybe he himself had died. “What does it mean to be dead?”

“Come here,” the boy said, and Jinyoung obeyed. He did not know to which the extent the boy was older than him but it was lined in his speech and thus Jinyoung would not disobey it.

He stepped forward until he was at the boy’s side, top of his head just under his ear. Jinyoung did not know at the time that in their adolescence they would fight for growth, always trying to be taller than the other, but that Jinyoung would always be just the tiniest of centimeters behind. For now, though, he took comfort in the presence of someone older than him in the fields where he had lost his grandfather that had disappeared like mist on the lake. 

The boy pointed to the ground where Jinyoung saw the crumpled body of a mouse. Its fur was dull with dirt and the globe of its black eyes were clouded with a film of blue not unlike that of the sky. Had he not known better he would have thought it was just a reflection. 

“What's wrong with it?” he whispered, as though the mouse could hear. 

The boy’s voice was flat. “It's dead.”

“Dead?”

“Yes.”

Jinyoung looked over and the boy was already looking. His eyes resembled the mouse in that they were almost entirely black like the stones of onyx he found sometimes in the riverbed. Jinyoung wondered what secrets they held; if there was a bottom, and how deep, and if he could reach it. 

“Won't it come back?” 

The boy shook his head.  _ No.  _ The tears that had not came at the news of his grandfather’s death tugged now at his chest like tiny hooks. The permanence of death began to unfurl like a scroll, spelling itself out for him in a way that it had not when his parents had cried. It yawned open like the black jaws of a beast to swallow him whole. 

“No,” he said. “Being dead means you don't come back.” 

Jinyoung looked at the boy and then at the mouse. The curled up ball of fur no longer grew and shrank with the tiny breaths from its nose but he could feel and hear the breathing of the boy beside him in place of it. There had once been the frantic hammering of a heart the size of a pebble against its furry chest; Jinyoung thought of leaning down to touch it the way he's sure the older boy had been but the thought of feeling the stillness made emotion pull tighter inside him until it hurt.

Death had been untouchable before then. It was something that happened to people that he had heard of but not people that he knew and thus made itself impossible. He had not believed in it and yet it had knocked on their door that day dressed in black like an apparition and came, anyway. 

“Your grandfather isn't here,” the boy said, but at the welling of Jinyoung’s tears his voice was no longer the dullness of boredom. It had softened somehow and he had even let Jinyoung clutch at a hand the same size as his own when tears spilled down his face to leave streaks in the pollen. “He isn't anywhere. He's gone.” 

Where he had gone to find his grandfather in the buckwheat fields and failed, he met Im Jaebum, instead. 

 

✺✺✺

 

Similarly, where the flowers would not bloom, tradition had, breathing life into the habitual.

After Jinyoung had wailed his song of rising and falling agony until the birds cawed angrily and scattered from their hideouts in the grass, he had wiped his face dry with a sleeve and extended his hand. They exchanged names and ages and determined that Jaebum was born in January and Jinyoung in September, so Jinyoung would call him  _ hyung.  _ The decision was unanimous. It was cemented even further when mere minutes after meeting the boy with the sharp cat’s eyes offered to help him bury the body of the mouse he had found. It was a mockery of the ritual and yet he had found peace in the way that dirt fell from Jaebum’s fingers like gentle rain from God’s hands over the mouse’s limp fur. It would not bring his grandfather back from the place beyond the buckwheat fields but it helped, in its way, to bury his new found sorrows. 

They met every single day after that. 

Where he did not get along with the boys at school much he found easy friendship at Jaebum’s side. He much preferred to read while the other boys played rough sports or made pretend games like they were soldiers on the battlefield. Oftentimes the Japanese boys in their class would make fun of them if they spoke amongst themselves in Korean, and Jinyoung went home frequently with welts on his knuckles from the meterstick. But he did not hate, because hate was ugly. It never seemed to bother Jaebum the way it bothered him and his first taste of envy was at eight years old. He wished to possess the calm that radiated off of Jaebum in waves. Instead he poured his heart into reading the books he stole off his father’s shelves and smuggled them like contraband to where Jaebum waited for him in the knee high grass. 

They were unstoppable. Rules and curfews meant nothing to them; they had made an unspoken agreement somewhere along the way that they were to always come, no matter what, and it was so. Not even weather was enough to stop them. They met in the mornings before school and in the afternoons when it was over. One of them was always there, waiting for the other. Sometimes they would have to wait for minutes, sometimes hours, but they never left until they saw the other come running down their side of the long dirt road. In the rain they would hug each other tight and speak breathlessly of their day as they forced air into their lungs from running. Rarely did they have the good sense to bring an umbrella but on the days that they did, they would grab hands and run into the rain soaked field. Water ran into the soft leather of their shoes and caked the stitched edges with mud. Stalks of buckwheat were trampled beneath their feet, dwarfed by their joy in spite of the weather, and left zig zagging trails behind them as they ran together with no real destination in mind. It was enough to just  _ be.  _

They went to different schools but their uniforms were the same, and sometimes they would play jokes on their parents or their school teachers by switching their shirts. As they grew up and their bodies filled out it became more obvious whose clothes were whose by the way that Jaebum’s shirts hung off the tiny frame of his shoulders. It was then that he realized just how different they were becoming although at the time of their meeting that had been fundamentally the same. His first stab of lust came at thirteen when Jaebum laughed his boyish laugh and pulled his shirt over his head to hand it over. His body was lean, skinnier than it would be later, but there was telltale lines in his stomach and hips where abs would form if he went to the army like the other boys would. Jinyoung’s stomach dropped and returned like a fighter plane at the sight of Jaebum’s chest; unmarked and tan but flecked with little silver scars of adventurous boyhood, he was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen. Sometimes Jaebum’s shirt would be off when he arrived at the field after doing his homework and the image of Jaebum’s broad back and the feline muscles moving under the skin getting smaller and smaller as he trailed away from Jinyoung and deeper into the field made him ache. Falling in love with a boy and watching him disappear into the grass now waist high reminded him painfully of the way he called out to a grandfather who could no longer respond. It felt irrationally like loss even though Jaebum always came back.

The seasons oscillated around them in pinwheeling colors as the months stretched into years. What was tradition turned into habit turned into necessity. There was never a day that they missed each other, rain or shine or snow, they met at the edge of the field every day for the next ten years. They grew together as two boys would; they got dirty, they got in fights, they rolled around in the buckwheat and smashed the flower buds to powder that left imprints on the navy of their school shirts. Jinyoung read to him often but when Jaebum’s voice dropped and changed into the melted honey of his adult timbre Jinyoung begged him to return the favor and he did. There was a part of him that felt guilty for feeling this way for his best friend, mouth always aching to kiss Jaebum’s lips when they filled out, when they were swollen from sickness, when he bit down on the bottom one out of shyness. It was true that the atmosphere between them had shifted from the innocence of youth to the careful dance of desire spurned on by adolescence; he noticed later on that Jaebum’s hands would often linger like his eyes on certain parts of Jinyoung’s body. Jinyoung had plenty of dreams that ended with him waking up in bed, sleep pants wet, and a film of sweat on his neck and chest. Lust, who first came at thirteen, seemed to never leave. But the seasons changed and their bodies grew and so did it.

 

✺✺✺

  
  
Their first kiss was in the fall of 1943 when Jinyoung had just turned seventeen. He had thought it impossible: their love was forbidden, unheard of, secretive. Sometimes when they met one would look over their shoulder in suspicion before a hand was grabbed and they were yanked away, down the hill and into the expanse of the buckwheat that swallowed them up like hungry waves. Despite the careful secrecy of their love the fields of grass became not only their oasis but it became everything. It was their kingdom; they alone were the subjects and they ruled over it with laughter and stolen kisses. 

Amongst the buckwheat they were gods. Jinyoung had tasted the saccharine sweetness of a berry’s juice on Jaebum’s tongue and had felt the heat of it in the depths of his soul like the birth of a universe.

“I love you,” Jaebum breathed, his honeysuckle voice roughened by twelve years of feeling. The words slipped past Jinyoung’s lips and he swallowed them whole. 

“I love you,” he whispered back.

It became obvious to his parents at some point that Jinyoung had no interest in bringing home a woman. This did not make them immediately suspicious, but it disappointed them. His father would sometimes look at him a certain way across the dinner table that asked a silent  _ why?  _ Hate finally filled his mouth with needles and the ugliness of it came unbidden in the curses and tears he’d shed often in the dark of his room alone. And yet without words, Jaebum knew. When Jaebum would lay on his back in the grass he would often pull Jinyoung down next to him to read together. The ache in his heart would slowly ebb and fade away until it was as though the pain never existed at all. 

 

✺✺✺

 

The fall of 1945 arrived on a gust of wind that sang of independence. His father had come stumbling in the door kicking up leaves that made his mother shout. The door had swung open and stayed, giving Jinyoung a view of the road and the fields where people were flooding. The stillness of their house on a quiet August afternoon had been disturbed by the frenzied storm that washed its way up across their porch and into the living room at his father’s heels. 

“What on earth is going on?” his mother demanded, sounding angry. Jinyoung looked up from his book to see his father’s hat get knocked off his head by a waving hand. 

“It’s over! They surrendered!” 

Jinyoung had dropped his book at the same time his mother dropped the teacup in her hand. They both shattered to the floor and remained untended to, even as hot tea seeped into the wood. “What?”

His father had barely answered. His dress shoes made a startling  _ clack clack clack  _ on their wooden floor as he crossed it hurriedly to pull his mother up from her chair by the arms and kiss her on the mouth. Jinyoung felt the stirring of pain that he could not do the same. 

“The Japanese surrendered, dear,” he said, and it was the closest he’d ever come to outshining the sadness folded into the corners of his eyes. “We’re free.” 

A feeling like a rogue wave pushed Jinyoung up off the couch. His book lay forgotten by the sofa as he toed into his shoes at the door and ignored his mother’s shouts.  _ Freedom.  _ Had they not been aching for this day before Jinyoung was even born? Excitement made his hands shake and slip as it coursed through him like a headrush. Wind blew more leaves onto the floor as he stepped out onto the porch. 

“Jinyoung?” his mother shouted after him. “Jinyoung!” 

He ignored her and jumped the stairs.  _ Freedom. _

He ran.

  
  
  


Jaebum was waiting for him, buzzing with an excitement mirrored in his hands as they grabbed at Jaebum’s shirt. 

“Hyung,” he said, breathless. Excited. Dizzy with feeling. “Hyung, they’re really going. We’re free.”

“I know,” he said back, and smiled that smile that crescented his eyes into slivers of new moons. “I came just now when I heard.” 

Jinyoung grinned wider. What else was there to be said? The freedom that they had ached for since before either of their births had found their country at last. Jaebum would no longer tease him for the Japanese name that his mother had chosen for him and refused to let him change despite it being too foreign and disconnected. He imagined that their schools were currently being raided and flags torn down and burned. He gripped Jaebum’s shirt tighter in his fists to pull his warm body closer and wished that they could be in the city center just then, sweating and lost in the sea of bodies that would gather in the streets to resound their joy. But, as always, he felt Jaebum’s hands on his hips and realized that it was enough to be here, alone.

“What?” Jaebum asked, because Jinyoung was staring.

“Kiss me,” he said, more breathless than before. Jaebum smiled.

“Here?” One of his hands lifted to point at Jinyoung’s cheek. 

“Yes.”

He kissed him there and leaned back. Jinyoung felt the warmth in his face and stomach as Jaebum’s gaze grew heavier and his smile sharper. He felt the pad of Jaebum’s finger on the tip of his nose.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

The finger traveled to his chin, where it lingered. “Here?” 

“Yes,” he whined, getting impatient, winding tighter as Jaebum teased. But his smile was blinding and it alone felt like celebration; Jinyoung, though so desperately wanting Jaebum’s mouth to cover his own, held on tight and played the game. 

Jaebum’s tongue swiped his bottom lip and Jinyoung’s stomach growled with hunger. The finger on his chin turned into a thumb as he dragged it across Jinyoung’s bottom lip slow. He listened to Jaebum’s breath hiccup and felt his arousal against his hip, his own growing like vines around his middle. Jaebum’s thumb pressed into the corner of his mouth and did not move even as one of his hands slid to Jinyoung’s lower back and pulled him close.

“Here?” he asked one last time. He sounded breathless as though he had been the one running.

Jinyoung smiled. “Yes.”

Jaebum kissed him. Somebody’s homemade fireworks whistled and exploded in the distance. He could taste real freedom in the curve of Jaebum’s lips as he smiled against his mouth. It tasted like cherries.

  
  


✺✺✺

  
  
  


“Hyung, tell me a story.” 

Jaebum looked over at him where his head rested on the folded  _ x  _ of his forearms. The buckwheat swayed over their heads, creating a sort of fortress that lent them a view of just the sky where they lay on their backs. It was waist high, now, and in the spring of 1950 they were men. 

One of Jinyoung’s favorite things is that Jaebum’s eyes had ceased to change. The little moles of his eye were distinct and visible against the unfair smoothness of his skin. He longed to stroke it as he often had but didn’t.

Those obsidian eyes like a cat’s watched his face. “Tell you a story?”

“Yes.” 

“What kind of story?” he asked, his face serious. Jinyoung noticed that lately there had been a kind of sadness that lingered around Jaebum’s shoulders, a sullen ghost in his smile that rose and fell quicker than it used to. In his way he had made many attempts to dispel it, but it always came back, following along at his ankles like a loyal dog. Jinyoung had never been overly cruel but had it been real, he would have found joy in kicking it. 

Jinyoung rolled onto his stomach, uncaring of the dust on his shirt and skin as he rested on his forearms. Jaebum’s gaze followed him as he half rose and looked down at him. The sun shone down on them through the opening their bodies had made in the buckwheat, but the places where their hips touched was warmer. 

“A ghost story.”

“Are you sure?” Jaebum smiled. For once it felt real, but it, too, quickly went away. “What if you get scared?” 

“I won’t be scared, hyung,” he said. “I have you.” 

A darkness passed over Jaebum’s face the way the clouds do the sun. Jinyoung could read the sadness in the frown lines of his face and it made his heart drop with anxiety. It was another symptom, another chemical that had slowly been poisoning the garden of their love that had flourished and grown into Eden over the past eighteen years. Jinyoung did his best to ignore it in hopes that it would go away, but it was times like this that he could see how it was curling and blackening at the edges with neglect. Jaebum’s throat worked in a dry swallow and his eyes were wet. Jinyoung thought angrily that it was much too late for spring rain. 

“Jinyoungie…”

He knew what Jaebum was going to say and he stifled it. This, too, was a calamity befallen; Jaebum had tried time and time again to tell him what he already knew and he would sidestep it every time it approached. Jinyoung knew what Jaebum meant to tell him. He had heard it from his father, and in the whispers that came from their bedroom when they thought he was asleep. He knew that his fate was sealed in a manner that was different from Jaebum’s but he refused to acknowledge it. And he refused to let Jaebum acknowledge it. 

“Just tell me a story,” he pleaded. His voice was thin and high like a reed, and it gave away the desperation he tried to hold behind his back like a secret fist. He knew and Jaebum knew that he knew. 

“What do you want to hear?” Jaebum asked, and the sadness had seeped into his voice. It was May, and the sun would only shine for so much longer. Jinyoung watched as dust and pollen gathered in the strands of Jaebum’s too-long hair as he removed one arm to touch Jinyoung’s face. 

“Anything, hyung,” he said, and would beg if necessary. It wouldn’t be. Jinyoung read the papers and eavesdropped on his parents and he knew that Jaebum did the same. 

He felt Jaebum’s fingertips where they traced the curve of his jaw, his cheek, underneath his eye as tears welled up and fell. It was only a matter of time, now. If he closed his eyes and listened, the swaying of the buckwheat over their heads in their private paradise no longer sounded like whispers but like hundreds of heavy boot steps marching in unison. 

Jaebum was a powerhouse that drew the warmth of the sun from the air and transferred it in touch. Every idle movement of his fingers on his skin, every kiss, every gentle entrance was fire that burned along his body and scorched it until it ached like sunburn. Sweat dripped down his back at the upturned corners of Jaebum’s mouth. Every inch of him was light, was heat, was love. And yet even as he leaned up on his elbows to bring their faces together to kiss, in his heart it felt like winter.

“I don’t have any stories to tell you,” Jaebum murmured. He kissed Jinyoung’s lips and then watched him where Jinyoung refused to look up from the ground.

Dirt gathered under his nails as he pushed his fingers into the soft earth. He had hoped that it would crumble underneath them and drag them in, but it merely buckled under his hands and dusted them in powder. 

“Why not?” 

Jaebum kissed him again and tried to smile. 

“Because there’s no story greater than ours, Jinyoung-ah.” 

And it was true. 

But stories end.    
  


✺✺✺

 

They were granted another six blissful months together. They both put that day behind them and danced around the heavy truth sitting between them like a landmine; it became easier by the day to find their smiles though Jaebum’s was always tinted with the shadow that never left even on the brightest days. Jinyoung woke up often in the night and in the mornings pinned down by an overwhelming sense of doom that had latched on. He had gained a stubborn puppy of his own, it seemed. 

November was cold and the wind whipped the corners of his jacket around his hips as he walked down the dirt road toward their meeting place. It was an odd morning; the dread had swelled to a deafening crescendo as he stepped out of the house and saw the storm that brewed on the horizon to threaten them with ice water. His heart was heavy and his thoughts were worse as he squinted into the razor sharp edge of the wind. 

Jaebum was waiting for him. His silhouette was the same as it always was, broad shoulders and slightly crooked legs, but there was a stiffness in his posture that had not existed before. Jinyoung, suddenly nervous, approached with his head down and talked into the dirt.

“It’s so windy today,” he complained. He sniffled as his nose ran from the cold. He wished absently that he’d brought a scarf as he looked at the worn and tattered tops of Jaebum’s shoes. The buckwheat, still waist high, hissed and shivered as the wind bent the stalks in half.

Jaebum didn’t reply and so Jinyoung looked up. His handsome face looked gaunt. There were shadows under his eyes and the high lines of his cheekbones were flushed with pink, both from the wind and the tears that he had undeniably cried some time before Jinyoung’s arrival. He looked more like the serious, strange boy he met in the fields when he was five than he did the happy, quiet boy he’d been for the last eighteen years. The cavern of his heart yawned open and the wind sliced inside. 

“Jinyoung.” 

In two syllables, everything. Jinyoung looked at Jaebum’s hands where they were down at his sides. One of them clutched a piece of yellow paper until it crumpled. 

He pointed. “What is that?” 

But he knew.

“You know what it is,” Jaebum said harshly. It stung more than the wind that bit at his face. 

“Let me see it.” 

“No.” 

Jinyoung could feel the tears but it was too cold to cry, so he swallowed them back and held out his hand. “I want to see it.”

“Why? You know what it says.” 

“I want to read it for myself.” 

Jaebum still refused. His hand didn’t move and yet underneath the sound of the wind he heard the paper crinkle. In a fit of anger Jinyoung reached forward, aiming to snatch it from him, but Jaebum had always been faster. His arm pulled back and he held Jinyoung away with a palm on his chest.

“Why do you want to read it so badly when you know what it says, Jinyoung-ah?”

Tears had no season and they fell in spite of the cold. His breath was a white cloud of steam from his mouth as he exhaled and lunged for it again. 

“I have to make it real, hyung,” he whimpered, and in it Jaebum finally heard.

He caught Jinyoung when he came forward, both hands gripping Jinyoung’s upper arms and pulling him tight to his body. The yellow paper crinkled against the sleeve of his jacket.

“It’s real, Jinyoung-ah,” he murmured into his hair, and the sunny warmth of Jaebum’s lips on his head did nothing to dispel the cold that drilled into his bones.

He reached up and plucked it from Jaebum’s hand; the older boy did nothing to get it back. Jaebum dropped his hands but stood close to Jinyoung’s body as if they were still touching as Jinyoung gripped the ruined paper in his hands and pulled it taut to read Jaebum’s name across the top. Though he had asked to read it, there was so many words on the page that he couldn’t bring himself to see. They had all known it was coming. When he could no longer read of Jaebum’s going away, there was the glaring red of the country’s military insignia stamped at the top like an ugly scar that marred the page.

“Hyung,” he whimpered, aware again that his fate and Jaebum’s were much different. Jaebum did not have the luxury of coming from a  _ yangban  _ family, even though, more than ever, that meant very little. But it meant enough: it meant that Jaebum would go to war and Jinyoung wouldn’t. 

His world that had once been a dizzying zoetrope of technicolor bled out to blacks and greys as Jaebum held him while he cried. He collapsed against Jaebum’s chest, the paper clutched in his own fist the way that he’s sure Jaebum’s mother had tried to crumple it before him, and added the signature of his tears to the page. Jaebum remained stoic but the ache of his fingertips digging into the tops of his forearms would leave little circle bruises in the patterns of his hands that would last for days to come; Jinyoung would press his own fingers into them to remind him how it felt. 

“I have to go,” he said, and there was no room for argument between the agony and the unrelent.

“Hyung,” he whimpered. The red rope around their hearts had somehow frayed to a single thread. He felt it as it pulled tight to snapping.

“I love you, Park Jinyoung,” he said. Like when he had said his grandfather was gone, and when he had said that he loved him the first time, and when he had said there was no story greater than their own, there was no greater truth, and Jinyoung believed him. 

“I love you, Im Jaebum,” he said back, his voice warbling like a songbird.

“Wait for me,” Jaebum murmured. He wiped the tears from Jinyoung’s cold cheeks and tried to warm them with his palms despite his own skin being cold. Jinyoung nodded and sniffled and continued to cry. “You’ll wait for me, won’t you?”

“I’ll wait for you forever, hyung,” he said. The sun was lowering herself into the freezing bathwater of the night. The little white buds of the buckwheat flowers had refused to bloom that year, much the same as they had for the past eighteen. Jinyoung looked at them from behind the sheen of wet in his eyes and nodded in their direction.

“We’ll meet back here,” he said, as though they had another choice. “You’ll be able to find it when you come back, right?” 

Jaebum nodded. Jinyoung drank up the soft features of his handsome face with the last of the light as it struggled and died. He looked at the two twin moles over Jaebum’s eyes like a personal constellation and closed his own to memorize the shape of it.

He felt Jaebum’s lips on his. He did not want a farewell kiss; he wanted a kiss that promised  _ see you later.  _ But even in the timbre of Jaebum’s  _ wait for me  _ he knew that there were no promises. Jaebum had taught him early of futility and death. The two were ever intertwined.

Jaebum let go of him and suddenly the world shifted, gone off course in its steady rotation. He reached out to grab him but Jaebum had already stepped away. In the light of the moon that rose, he could see the shine of tears in Jaebum’s eyes darker than the night itself.

“I love you,” he said again. “We’ll meet here again in the spring.”

And then he was gone. 


	2. ii.

 

Spring came.

Jaebum didn't.

 

 


	3. iii.

 

1951 came and went, spring melting into summer freezing into winter. 

Two years passed. Jinyoung waited for him every day at the place where their feet had worn a welcome mat in the dirt.

Jaebum never showed.

 

✺✺✺

 

When the war ended in the summer of 1953, he received a letter.

Jinyoung was twenty-six. He lived in his parents house alone; they had moved on into the city as they felt the countryside was too dangerous in a place too close to the border for comfort. Jinyoung disagreed. Standing on the porch and gazing out in the buckwheat fields across the dirt road, he felt as safe as he ever had. Which was to say he didn’t at all, but in Jaebum’s absence it was unlikely that he ever would again.

The mail carrier walked up the short path to his porch steps and stopped at the bottom. Jinyoung, who had been sitting on the porch, tilted his head. 

“Can I help you?” 

“Park Jinyoung?” 

His heart that lay dormant for years suddenly began to pound. A sweat beaded on his neck and palms. 

“Yes?” 

The mail carrier looked down. He looked back up after a moment and held out a crisp, white envelope.

“This is for you.”

He crossed the porch to take it. The mail carrier hurried back down the dirt path when Jinyoung held the large envelope in his hands and continued on, leaving him alone in the buzzing humidity of the summer. The envelope drew his attention away from the sweltering heat that pressed in like a wet cloth; it was heavy and clean. He turned it over in his hands knowing already what he would see but it did nothing to prepare him for the way his heart dropped and shattered like the teacup his mother had dropped years ago. 

Across the seam was the red, wax seal of the military. On the front was just his name, his address, and no return.He knew what it meant: this was a notification of death or an assumed death in a POW camp. His hands began to shake as agony that had been held down for years by his hands suddenly swelled and burst like a blister. Blood welled up in the microscopic line that the envelope made in his finger when he tore it open. The sting of the paper cut was nothing compared to the sluggish beating of his heart, too heavy in his chest to stand, and he dropped to his knees when the contents of the envelope spilled out where he dropped it. 

There were two letters. One was official; it stated the day and nature of Jaebum's heroic sacrifice in a war that no one wanted to fight and thus he refused to look at it. The other was written in Jaebum’s sloppy hand. It started with  _ Dear my Jinyoungie, if you’re reading this, I didn’t make it in time to meet you in the spring.  _ It said nothing else of dying; he had predicted his own death and yet had written Jinyoung a letter without mentioning it once. Tears blurred his vision as he fought the urge to tear it. How could he? How could he write the words as if he would someday come back and be able to read them aloud from the page the way they’d read each other from smuggled books?  _ Dear my Jinyoungie, if you’re reading this, I didn’t make it in time to meet you in the spring. Dear my Jinyoungie, if you’re reading this, I didn’t make it.  _

“Was that so hard?” Jinyoung sobbed. He hit his fists against the old, cracking wood of the porch and then did it again. His teeth hurt where he clenched them together. “Would that have been so hard, you bastard?”

In a fit of grief and rage, he scattered the papers wide. The notice from the military typed on official letterhead that signaled the declaration of Jaebum’s true death winked at him as it slid from the porch and fluttered to the ground out of sight. Out of the envelope slid more paper; another note, an invitation to a memorial service, and a palm sized square of white.

Angrily he reached for it, barely noticing Jaebum’s handwriting on the back. Jinyoung slapped it face up on the porch and tore at his hair.

It was a photograph. Jaebum in his uniform, standing in front of a barrack. He was holding his helmet at his hip and smiling that happy boy’s smile that turned his eyes into crescent moons. 

_ Dear my Jinyoungie. _

Jinyoung wailed. Agony drew out her claws and dug them in, tearing him open with every breath. Fat tears spilled from his eyes and splashed across the face of Jaebum’s photograph that he covered with his hand, too sick to look at it. The wind rustled his hair and the pages slipped ever so slightly down the porch as his heart imploded like a dying star and took everything else with it.

_ Maybe he’s just lost in the buckwheat fields,  _ he heard himself say. A child’s innocence. A child’s hopeful ignorance that swept him up off his feet with the photograph in hand and had him running down the road.

It was no harder than it had been for the past three years of Jaebum’s absence to find the place that they had agreed to meet. There was a permanent patch on the side of the field that had been beaten and worn underneath their feet and he found it through the tears that veiled his eyes like a constant sheet of rain. He had not run in a long time, and his lungs burned with effort and anguish as he rushed out into the buckwheat. It was up to his belly now, unkempt and unregulated in the years of the war; it brushed his bare arms like the hands of ghosts as he ran. All around him it whispered and breathed, and every gust of wind sent a million lost voices calling his name. His breath was short and burned like acid when he sucked in a deep breath and called out. 

_ “Jaebum hyung!”  _ he shouted. The wind blew. The buckwheat whispered back but Jaebum didn’t. His breath hitched and broke as he called again.  _ “Jaebum hyung!” _

There was nothing. The wind blew harder and the stalks bent further. Jinyoung could feel the desperation as it pulled him into an agonized frenzy. He remembered the way he had done this so many years ago, calling with a child’s voice to a ghost, though he hadn’t known that then. A sob ripped from his chest as he imagined Jaebum’s head of black hair appearing from the depths to tell him that death means you don’t come back. 

His voice tore out of him as he screamed. There was the coppery taste of blood in his mouth.  _ “Jaebum hyung!”  _

_ Dear my Jinyoungie. If you’re reading this, I’m not here. I’m not anywhere. I’m gone. _

He didn’t see the rock lost under the sea of unending green stalks and white buds before he felt it catch him up. Jinyoung made a haunted noise as he tripped, photograph clutched in his hand. He sank into the depths of the buckwheat field where he had lost another love like a ship dashed to pieces against the rock. He could not find it within himself to cry out when the dry dirt scraped his palms and drew blood. 

“Jaebum hyung,” he wept. His tears were drank by the dry earth before he ever hit the ground on his elbows. 

Death had once been incomprehensible to him and yet it had shown its face many times. It seemed to always take something in order to gain, and yet he had not gained anything from this except the torture of a broken heart. A storm began to roll in overhead as he sobbed until he could no longer breathe; he dropped to his back, immobilized in the wake of realizing that Jaebum was never coming back to meet him at their spot in the springtime. He clutched the photograph to his chest and wondered how, in his father's voice, God could be so cruel. 

The storm approached but did not come. Jinyoung didn’t notice. His eyes were closed as he cried and they remained closed as he succumbed to exhaustion and fell asleep amongst the stalks with Jaebum’s picture pressed against his heart. 

  
  
  


When he woke up some hours later, the sun had lowered and was clinging to the horizon line as if she were waiting for something. Every nerve in Jinyoung’s body screamed in pain as he blinked awake; he was not allowed the blissful moment upon awaking where he forgot the agonies of the real world. The ache had thrummed inside him as he slept in the field the same way it would for years until his own death. There was no escape. The wave drew up again and the tears came as soon as his eyes were open. 

Thunder rumbled in the distance. He struggled to adjust to the change in light; he felt where Jaebum’s picture was still pressed against his heart and he let his head drop down to the ground. The noises pulling themselves from his mouth were inhuman in their grief. 

He missed Jaebum more than anything. How he deluded himself for the three years that the war lasted, he didn’t know. It was the child’s naivety that he’d clutched for dear life since Jaebum had entered his and never let go of. Jaebum had taught him the finality of death and yet all at once shielded him from it for the better part of eighteen years. Though it should have occurred to him, it never did. He held out in stupid hope that they’d live forever in the buckwheat. 

“I love you,” he said to no one. Much like calling to his grandfather, he knew there was no one listening. He said it anyway. “I love you, I love you.”

The light had faded until there was nothing left but a burning rim of orange that illuminated the white buds of the buckwheat stalks over his head like oil lamps. He stared at them, wondering why they never bloomed, if they were stuck here in some kind of afterlife.

“What do I do?” he asked. The grass whispered back but he couldn’t understand it. 

Jinyoung turned his head. He meant to get up, despite how much it hurt, but something caught his eye. Near his face was a new stalk, a tiny one. One that had seemed to miss the memo about growing and had only just arrived. Jinyoung’s tears slipped silently down his face; he was mesmerized by this tiny thing, a lonely stalk amongst a sea of giants. It seemed to share his sense of immense loneliness. There was a camaraderie in the petals that had burst from the tightly wrapped bud when he’d been asleep. He reached out to touch it, fingers brushing the two little dots of pink on the petal that looked suspiciously like moles. It made him smile an empty smile.

Jaebum had said that being dead means you don’t come back. Jinyoung had always taken his word as gospel, knowing that Jaebum was wise beyond his years in a way that Jinyoung never would be. Despite the pained beating of his broken heart, there was solace in the way that it seemed even Jaebum could go back on his word. 

Amongst the sea of buds where their love had flourished for nearly twenty years, a single buckwheat flower bloomed.

Perhaps Jaebum had heard him, after all.

 


End file.
